Cristina Kirchner retains her ability to provoke political earthquakes despite not holding any public office. The former Argentine president took six days to speak out on the questioned elections in Venezuela, but in doing so, she thrust a dagger into the heart of Nicolás Maduro’s government. “I ask you, not only for the Venezuelan people, for the opposition, for democracy, [but] for Hugo Chávez’s own legacy, to publish the records,” she said. Maduro’s circle interpreted Kirchner’s distancing between Chávez and his successor as disloyalty, and this Sunday they responded. They accused her, without naming her, of having betrayed both the legacy of Peronism and the Argentine people.
The National Electoral Council of Venezuela has declared Maduro the winner of the presidential elections on July 28 with almost 52% of the votes, compared to the 43% awarded to opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, but a week later, they still have not shown the records, and both the opposition and several countries, including the United States, have recognized González Urrutia as the winner.
On Saturday, during the closing of a seminar in Mexico, Kirchner positioned herself alongside three major leaders of contemporary Latin American left — Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Colombian Gustavo Petro — who demand an impartial verification of the results. However, her insinuation that refusing a transparent vote count jeopardizes Chávez’s legacy was an indigestible comment for Maduro’s supporters.
The vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, responded this Sunday to the former president: “Chávez’s legacy is in good hands.” His darts were explicitly aimed at Alberto Fernández, who came to power in 2019 thanks to Kirchnerism’s support: “Why is [Javier] Milei in Argentina? Because of Alberto Fernández’s lukewarmness. Because of that lukewarmness, they betrayed the legacy of Kirchner, of Perón, and their own people, and then they want to express opinions on Venezuela,” Cabello said on the opinion program Con el mazo dando. Thus, he referred to two central figures of Peronism, its founder Juan Domingo Perón and former president Néstor Kirchner, of whom the ex-president takes pride just as Maduro does with Chávez.
The Venezuelan deputy suggested that the criticisms received from Argentina are motivated by envy. “Against Venezuela, against Chávez, and against Nicolás Maduro, there is great envy because here, in Venezuela, this project has been maintained. They have gone through governments in their countries and ended up handing over the government to the far-right because they have not been consistent with the people who elected them,” he emphasized.
The rest of Kirchner’s speech had a more friendly tone toward Maduro’s government, but it went almost unnoticed. “Those who say there is a dictatorship in Venezuela have deputies who visit genocides in prison,” she denounced, referring to the controversial visit of legislators from Javier Milei’s party to those convicted for crimes against humanity committed during the last Argentine dictatorship. “Those who talk about dictatorship are the ones who supplied weapons to the coup in Bolivia. We need to be more coherent, please,” she warned after saying that in Venezuela “there are no angels or demons.”
“He will be a dictator”
The aftershocks of the earthquake provoked by the former president continued this Monday. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, one of the reference organizations in the fight for human rights during the last Argentine dictatorship, also distanced itself from Maduro. “It is clearly seen that he has cheated. I don’t know, he will be a dictator. In any case, there have been and there will be,” said the head of Abuelas, Estela de Carlotto, in a telephone interview with Radio 10.
De Carlotto criticized Maduro’s unwillingness to step down from his position despite the evidence of a lack of transparency in the electoral process and agreed with Kirchner in pointing out the differences between the founder of Chavismo and his heir. “He is offending Chávez’s memory,” she warned. “Nothing to do with it,” she emphasized while comparing the two Venezuelan leaders.
From allies to drawing red lines
The short circuit between Maduro and Kirchner shows the growing isolation of Chavismo in Latin America. Both Néstor Kirchner and his wife and successor, Cristina Kirchner, were firm allies in their beginnings. The first’s rise to the presidency of Argentina in 2003 coincided with Chávez coming to power in Venezuela and Lula in Brazil, which was considered the beginning of a golden age for the Latin American left.
More than two decades later, former allies like Cristina Kirchner are beginning to turn their backs. They do so with words less harsh than those from other influential players in the international community, who denounce electoral fraud and condemn the violent repression of opposition protests, in which at least eleven people have died, and about 2,000 have been detained. But any criticism, no matter how unexpected, immediately makes them the protagonists.
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